Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Byron Caminero-Santangelo (Editor), Garth Myers (Editor)

$36.95

Publication Date: August 20th, 2011

Publisher:

Ohio University Press

ISBN:

9780821419786

Pages:

304

Description

Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers. The essays bring together scholarship in geography, anthropology, and environmental history with the study of African and colonial literatures and with literary modes of analysis. Contributors analyze writings by colonial administrators and literary authors, as well as by such prominent African activists and writers as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Ben Okri. These postcolonial ecocritical readings focus on dialogue not only among disciplines but also among different visions of African environments. In the process, Environment at the Margins posits the possibility of an ecocriticism that will challenge and move beyond marginalizing, limiting visions of an imaginary Africa.

Contributors:
Jane Carruthers
Mara Goldman
Amanda Hammar
Jonathan Highfield
David McDermott Hughes
Roderick P. Neumann
Rob Nixon
Anthony Vital
Laura Wright

About the Author

Byron Caminero-Santangelo is an associate professor of English at theUniversity of Kansas. He is the author of African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality and has written extensively on the intersection of African literary studies and ecocriticism.

Garth Myers is Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban and International Studies in the Center for Urban and Global Studies and Department of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice, Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa, and Disposable Cities: Garbage, Governance and Sustainable Development in Urban Africa, and coeditor with Martin J. Murray of Cities in Contemporary Africa.

Praise for Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

“Ecocritical studies have long neglected the postcolonial regions of the world, so it’s refreshing and timely to see a collection of essays focused entirely on Africa. This collection is the first of its kind and as such is positioned to make a vital intervention in postcolonial, ecocritical, and African studies.”—Elizabeth DeLoughrey, author of Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment

“A groundbreaking intervention into African, postcolonial, literary, and environmental studies.”—Research in African Literatures